PARTISAN REVIEW
fronted with a moral and personal problem of extreme complexity. This
problem is Kirby Allbee, a New England man fallen into the gutter, an
alcoholic, a shabby, deteriorating member of the middle class, furious
with resentments and outraged vanity. Allbee has not survived; his wife
is dead and he has been unemployed for years, living in flop houses, bit–
terly paying for his maladjustment. Who is to blame for his debasement?
Allbee believes the Jews are to blame and that Leventhal is particularly
and concretely guilty.
The two men had met years ago at a party. Allbee, though an in–
decent anti-Semite, nevertheless gave Leventhal, who was out of a
job, a letter to his employer. During the interview Leventhal lost his
temper and argued with the employer over the matter of technical
qualifications for the position. The employer became enraged and fired
Allbee merely for having recommended Leventhal. Or is that why
Allbee was fired? What about his drinking, his unstable character? The
question of the novel is not whether Allbee deserved his fate, but how
much Leventhal is to blame for the fortuitous results of his actions.
Allbee begins to pursue Leventhal. What does he want? More than
anything else he seems to want Leventhal to recognize the possibility of
his guilt. Leventhal must be forced to share Allbee's downfall, a condi–
tion that is accomplished brilliantly. Allbee moves into Leventhal's dull
but orderly life, bringing with him alcoholic disorder, unpredictability,
vice, and frightening confusion. Leventhal, the family man, the plodding,
exhausted survivor of a bleak childhood, is soon surrounded by dirt, lice,
empty whisky bottles, illicit sexuality-all the madness of a willful urge
for self-destruction, an urge which Allbee conceives of as peculiarly
Gentile. Leventhal, never having had Allbee's great expectations for hap–
piness, is disgusted by what seems the entirely avoidable chaos in All–
bee's character. (Why can't he pull himself together? Why can't he stop
drinking?) The conclusion-and there is not just one conclusion in this
haunting collision of character-seems to be that both men are somewhat
released when Leventhal, by a series of actions, accepts not so much his
guilt for Allbee's condition but the possibility that, despite their anti–
pathetic natures, each owes something to the other, if only the admission
that no one can ever be sure of being truly blameless for the evil around
him.
This short comment does little justice to the many levels of meaning
in
The Victim.
And it should be added that whatever meaning there is
in the book is contained in the situation in which the characters find
themselves and not in the surrounding rhetoric. More than anything else
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